Sunday, May 31, 2015

Karl Blossfeldt was an attentive observers of nature, a teacher of contemplation. He used photography in the early days but his images are still powerful today. It reminds us to look at the ordinary and realize the immanent wonder.

Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932) was a German instructor of sculpture who used his remarkable photographs of plant studies to educate his students about design elements in nature. Self-taught in photography, he devoted himself to the study of nature, photographing nothing but flowers, buds and seed capsules for thirty-five years. He once said,"The plant never lapses into mere arid functionalism; it fashions and shapes according to logic and suitability, and with its primeval force compels everything to attain the highest artistic form."

Blossfeldt's photographs were made with a homemade camera that could magnify the subject up to thirty times its actual size. By doing so he revealed extraordinary details within the natural structure of the plants. In the process he created some of the most innovative photographic work of his time. The simple yet expressive forms captured on film affirmed his boundless artistic and intellectual ability.

Published in 1928 when Blossfeldt was sixty-three and a professor of applied art at the Berliner Kunsthochschule,Urformen der Kunst quickly became an international bestseller and in turn made Blossfeldt famous almost overnight. His contemporaries were enchanted by the abstract shapes and structures in nature that he revealed to the world. In 2001 Urformen der Kunst was included in "The Book of 101 Books" as one of the seminal photographic books of the Twentieth Century.

Saturday, May 30, 2015

The Major, Graf von Farlsberg, the Prussian
commandant, was reading his newspaper, lying back in a great armchair, with his
booted feet on the beautiful marble fire-place, where his spurs had made two
holes, which grew deeper every day, during the three months that he had been in
the château of Urville.

A cup of coffee was smoking
on a small, inlaid table, which was stained with liquors, burnt by cigars,
notched by the pen-knife of the victorious officer, who occasionally would stop
while sharpening a pencil, to jot down figures, or to make a drawing on it,
just as it took his fancy.

Friday, May 29, 2015

Irecalled
this horrible story, the events of which occurred long ago, and this horrible
woman, the other day at a fashionable seaside resort, where I saw on the beach
a well-known young, elegant and charming Parisienne, adored and respected by
everyone.

Ihad been invited by a friend to pay him a
visit in a little provincial town. He took me about in all directions to do the
honors of the place, showed me noted scenes, chateaux, industries, ruins. He
pointed out monuments, churches, old carved doorways, enormous or distorted
trees, the oak of St. Andrew, and the yew tree of Roqueboise.

Thursday, May 28, 2015

Allwere
crowding around M. Bermutier, the judge, who was giving his opinion about the
Saint-Cloud mystery. For a month this in explicable crime had been the talk of
Paris. Nobody could make head or tail of it.

M.Bermutier,
standing with his back to the fireplace, was talking, citing the evidence,
discussing the various theories, but arriving at no conclusion.

Somewomen
had risen, in order to get nearer to him, and were standing with their eyes
fastened on the clean-shaven face of the judge, who was saying such weighty
things. They, were shaking and trembling, moved by fear and curiosity, and by
the eager and insatiable desire for the horrible, which haunts the soul of
every woman. One of them, paler than the others, said during a pause:

"It'sterrible.
It verges on the supernatural. The truth will never be known."

Write what you know, novelists are often advised, and Judy Blume knew many things when she wrote the books that proved so influential and iconic that their author eventually became a question on Jeopardy!, and the inspiration for an episode of South Park and a Saturday Night Liveskit, not to mention a hero and sentimental favorite of generations of readers. Among those things is that growing up is a time of powerful, dramatic occurrences. It’s been more than 45 years since Blume’s first book was published, but she is still writing what she knows, and still turning to the early years for that knowledge. Except this time, with In the Unlikely Event, instead of looking inward, examining the emotional upheaval evoked by bodily changes and new physical sensations, Judy Blume is looking outward. Or, more to the point, upward.

In the early 1950s, when Blume was a teenager in Elizabeth, New Jersey, three airplanes crashed in her town within 58 days, creating fear, anxiety, and bewilderment. But though Blume grew up amidst these events, it took her more than half a century to think about turning them into a book. It wasn’t until 2009, while she was listening to the writer Rachel Kushner talk about stories her mother had told of growing up in Cuba in the 1950s, that Blume envisioned her own 1950s novel. It came to her in an instant, with various characters and plots. Blume spent five years on her story, which blends real-life facts with fiction. While the book is multi-generational, it’s not at all surprising that the character at its heart is a 15-year-old girl.

Many of us, having long left behind girlhood and adolescence in a big, Love’s Fresh Lemon-scented puddle of training bras and clogs, still remember with nostalgic pleasure and gratitude Blume’s classic works, which mirrored and illuminated our own experiences. So, with this new book—her first adult novel in 17 years—is Blume, as we might hope, beginning a late-life fiction whirlwind? “I can’t imagine writing another novel,” she says. “Of course I said the same thing after Summer Sisters. I meant it then. But I think I mean it more now. I feel good about that,” she adds. “I feel elated about that. And at 77 I think that’s O.K.”

Tuesday, May 26, 2015

Oliver Sacks, medical storyteller extraordinaire, in Manhattan on the edge of the Hudson, 1990. By Ken Shung/MPTVImages.com.

A Rare, Personal Look at Oliver Sacks’sEarly Career

The world was saddened to learn of neurologist and best-selling author Oliver Sacks’s terminal illness through a recent op-ed. With Sacks’s new autobiography out this month,Lawrence Weschler shares early stories and diary entries about Sacks, his close friend, before Sacks achieved worldwide fame.

This past February 19, fans and friends of Oliver Sacks learned, by way of an article he published in The New York Times, that the great neurologist and medical chronicler had terminal cancer. “Nine years ago,” he explained, “it was discovered that I had a rare tumor of the eye, an ocular melanoma. The radiation and lasering to remove the tumor ultimately left me blind in that eye. But though ocular melanomas metastasize in perhaps 50 percent of cases, given the particulars of my own case, the likelihood was much smaller. I am among the unlucky ones.”

Monday, May 25, 2015

BOOKS

MUSCLE-BOUND

Tom Wolfe’s “Back to Blood.”

Wolfe has argued that modern American fiction has fallen into sterility and irrelevance because novelists aren’t looking at the world. Photograph by Henry Leutwyler.

Tom Wolfe writes Big and Tall Prose—big subjects, big people, and yards of flapping exaggeration. No one of average size emerges from his shop; in fact, no real human variety can be found in his fiction, because everyone has the same enormous excitability. So his new novel, “Back to Blood” (Little, Brown), is supposedly about Miami. But it is about Miami not as, say, “Dead Souls” is about Russia or “Seize the Day” is about New York but more as heavy metal is about noise: not a description of the property but a condition of its excess. If it is about Miami, then “The Bonfire of the Vanities” and “A Man in Full” were also about Miami, not about New York and Atlanta, respectively. The content and the style haven’t changed much since “The Bonfire of the Vanities” was published, in 1987: select your city; presume it to be a site of simmering racial and ethnic civil war, always a headline away from a riot; throw a sensational news story into the fire; and watch the various interest groups immolate themselves.

Sunday, May 24, 2015

If I have a fault in relation to women, it's that I'm too dependent on love. When I'm deeply involved and all is not going well, my creative impulses become somewhat sublimated. I used to think the answer was not to get involved.

Monday, March 28, 2011 at 11:19AM

Warren Beatty was wild about Joan Collins. He was enthusiastic about his relationship with her beyond anything he had sampled before. As Warren's friend Verne O'Hara put it, "Sex drives Joan. She was besotted with him. And he was besotted with her." He defended her acting ability constantly, with his fists if necessary. He also used her for his own ends; suggesting she leave the set of a British adaptation of Sons and Lovers as the cast left for England because the publicity she attracted was more useful to him by his side. She was something in Hollywood, and that was what he wanted to be.

For her part, she was devoted to him, and he even bought an engagement ring for her, a gold beacon surrounded by emeralds and diamonds. In January of 1959, they moved into a tiny studio apartment in the Chateau Marmont.